Lately the previous confidence in e-learning has declined. An OECD report from 2005 states that elearning has been an administrative success, but not as far as learning itself is concerned. In 2003 Commissionaire Reding gave a speech, in which she strongly promoted blended learning as the way forward towards a learner-centric approach to learning with a more or less hidden criticism toward e-le...

It has been shown in (Angluin and Becerra-Bonache, 2010, 2011) that interactions between a learner and a teacher can help language learning. In this paper, we make use of additional contextual information in a pairwise-based generative approach aiming at learning (situation,sentence)-pair-hidden markov models. We show that this allows a significant speed-up of the convergence of the syntactic l...

Until recently, the accepted model for instruction was based on the hidden assumption that knowledge can be transferred intact from, the mind of the teacher to the mind of the learner. Educators therefore focused on getting knowledge into the heads of their students, and educational researchers tried to find better ways of doing this [1]. Unfortunately, all too many of us who teach for a living...

This paper discusses a data-driven learning (DDL) tool, which consists of a learner corpus for L2 learners of German. The learner corpus, in addition to submissions from ongoing current users, has been constructed from millions of submissions from a variety of activity types of approximately 5000 learners who used the E-Tutor CALL system over a period of five years. By following a cyclical proc...

This paper considers learner misconceptions information which is presented to the learner in an open learner model. We suggest that specific information about misconceptions may be of benefit to the learner, to help them reflect on their knowledge and understanding. We investigate acceptance of their misconceptions presented as animations and step-by-step text descriptions by two groups of user...

We consider the problem of performing inverse reinforcement learning when the trajectory of the expert is not perfectly observed by the learner. Instead, a noisy continuoustime observation of the trajectory is provided to the learner. This problem exhibits wide-ranging applications and the specific application we consider here is the scenario in which the learner seeks to penetrate a perimeter ...

Implementing the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) as the centerpiece of a poverty-reduction strategy implies that agriculture and its individual subsectors must play a primary role as leading sources of pro-poor growth at national level. Uganda and other African countries pursuing the CAADP agenda are not just seeking to accelerate growth but also to maximize and b...

Africa is the world’s most aided major region. Yet economic growth has been disappointingly low there. A number of factors explain the poor outcomes and limited sustainability of and in Africa. But the organisation and management of the aid relationship is a particularly important one, including the dependence of Africans on that aid. The currently popular nostrums for solving the problem of th...